Notwithstanding the significant advances made in the past decades, Web and print publishing technology continue to suffer from a number of disadvantages preventing users from fully realizing the benefits that may flow from advances in computing and related technology.
For example, current publishing technology is unable to flexibly accommodate content items of different sizes within display presentations. Specifically, most Web sites continue to be unable to allow display of content items of different sizes, such as advertisements of different sizes, to appear in a given position within a Web page, without incurring unacceptable layout effects, such as overlapping of content items, internal wasted space, unreadable text, and so forth.
Another example is current publishing technology failing to take full advantage of the available area of display presentations to display information. Specifically, Web sites cannot take full advantage of available area of client browser windows to display content items, such as advertisements. Client browser windows often use a variety of screen resolutions and window sizes. To accommodate the largest number of potential viewers, Web pages are typically authored using small fixed widths. As a result, the majority of clients can view the Web pages without horizontal scrolling. But then clients with larger displays have unused real estate. HTML and CSS allow Web pages to be authored with percent widths, so that HTML/CSS Web pages stretch to fit large client display widths. However, layouts with percent widths can generate internal wasted real estate. Even if no real estate is wasted, percent widths do nothing to use increased real estate for additional information display.
Still another example is the manner current publishing technology handles situations where there's more information to display than will fit in a display presentation. Current Web technology provides facilities to allow scrolling in the display window, for the users to access the information that did not fit in the display window. Specifically, Web browsers provide horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars in situations where a Web page to be displayed is larger in at least one dimension than the Web browser window. Some Web sites use downloadable scripts that affect information display within a particular region of the page, so that more information may be cycled through this region than will fit in the region all at once. Some of these sites fit formatted or unformatted text into the region, according to the region's dimensions as determined by standard HTML/CSS layout rules, with text layout sensitive to the reader's specified preferences for such parameters as number of columns. For these sites, the reader may direct successive portions of a text flow to appear within the designated region, so that the successive renderings of the region are analogous to pages of a printed document. However, there's currently no way to cycle content items through multiple regions of a display window while maintaining paged presentations in one or more regions of the window, while not requiring the cycled content items to conform to fixed region sizes, and while allowing all information to be visible in the display window without scrolling. One consequence is severely limited possibilities for displaying advertising in Web-based periodicals.
Still another example is the limited ability of current Web technology to accommodate changes to displayed constituents that occur as the user views the display. Currently, constituents can replace other constituents in regions with fixed dimensions, where the old constituent and new constituent have approximately the same fixed dimensions. It's also currently possible for constituents to appear into what would otherwise be empty space, and for constituents to expand into empty space. Conversely, it's currently possible for constituents to be replaced by empty space, and for constituents to shrink so that part of the area they formerly occupied becomes empty space. Further, it's currently possible to expand into and shrink from empty space through a ripple effect applying along a single dimension. For example, given a vertical column with multiple constituents and empty space on the bottom, if a constituent that's not at the bottom expands, the constituents that lie below it can shift downward accordingly, with a corresponding reduction of the amount of empty space at the bottom of the column. Outside these bounds, with current Web technology, changes to displayed constituents are liable to incur unacceptable layout effects, such as overlapping of content items, internal wasted space, unreadable text, and so forth.
Grid-based templates have long been a standard basis for specifying families of layouts. More recently, container-based templates have become a standard basis for specifying families of Web layouts. For example, current server page technology allows dynamic content to be directed to HTML containers, such as tables, or to specific slots in HTML containers, such as table cells. Current Web authoring models, current automated tools for authoring print layouts, and current technology for serving dynamic Web content are all limited by their reliance on variants of the template model.
Above are just examples and not all the disadvantages and/or problems addressed by the present invention.